I’m so pleased to have made the aquaintance of Shakespeare scholar, Colin Jory, who is a mine of information from which I have discovered rare gems and real nuggets of documentary proof for the Bard’s Catholicism. In his latest e-mail, he gives further solid evidence that Shakespeare counted known recusant Catholics amongst his closest friends and that these friendships add weight to the so-called “Shakeshafte theory”, which claims that Shakespeare worked as a young schoolmaster for a militant Catholic family in Lancashire.

Here’s the full text of his e-mail:

Here are a few facts and thoughts which have come my way over the years and which might be of interest.

1. Christopher Beeston.

In the Catholic Record Society publication series Volume 9 (confusingly titled “Miscellaneous VII”), pp.123-24, there is mention of “William Allen servant to Christopher Beeston, player”, who confessed to going to Mass at the Spanish Ambassador’s residence. A footnote tells that Beeston’s wife, Jane, and Allen were reported as recusants in 1614 and 1615.

Where a wife but not her husband was a recusant, the husband would usually have been a “church papist”, a Catholic who conformed minimally to the Established Church to escape the recusancy fines; and so it’s odds-on that Christopher Beeston, actor in Shakespeare’s Company, was a crypto-Catholic.

Now, it is Christopher who is the ultimate known source of the tradition, relayed by his son William to John Aubrey, that Shakespeare when young served as a “schoolmaster in the country”. If Christopher was a Catholic, it is likely that he and Shakespeare would have told him facts about himself which he would not have shared with non-Catholics. Thus the reason the information about Shakespeare having been a schoolmaster has come to us only through Beeston might be precisely because it was tied up with Shakespeare’s Catholic connections and Catholic confidential history – specifically, with his (presumptive) time at Lea Hall in Lancashire – and was therefore not the kind of thing which he wanted to be generally known.

2. Formally a tutor and incidentally a player, or formally a player and covertly a tutor?

By effect of the 1563 Supremacy of the Crown Act (5 Eliz. I c.1), “all schoomasters, and public and private teachers of children” were required to take the Oath of Supremacy, which meant in practice that they had to be licensed, with taking the Oath being a prerequisite for licensing. In view of this, it is much more likely that Shakespeare, if he was indeed the “William Shakeshafte” who in 1581 was a servant of the player-retaining Catholic Alexander Hoghton of Lea Hall, was ostensibly a player but covertly a tutor than that he was formally a tutor and incidentally a player.

3. Alum.

Professor Richard Wilson mentioned in an article, “Shakespeare and the Jesuits”, in the Times Literary Supplement of 19 December 1997, that the Hoghton fortune was partly derived from alum mines. Now, alum was an essential element in tanning; and John Shakespeare, William’s father, was, inter alia, a whitawer, or tanner of fine leathers (such as were used for gloves – and, of course, he was a glover also). Therefore he would certainly have been aware of the Hoghtons from when he was a young man, and might well have had trading ties with them. Moreover, being a zealous Catholic, John might have maintained such ties not merely for business reasons but to help keep vital the links between the Stratford region Catholicism and Lancashire Catholicism. It is even imaginable that, being an enterprising businessman (as the records show), he become a middle-man for Lancashire alum. In short, the alum trade could have created links between the Shakespeares and the Hoghtons even before 1579, when the Lancashireman John Cottam, who had close Hoghton connections, became the Stratford schoolmaster.